Influencing Conformity to Group Norms and Evaluate Research

In our society, conformity is an overwhelmingly prominent influence, and people commonly dismiss their personal norms to fit group and social norms. Conformity is a complicated influence, which makes people change their attitudes or behavior in order to fit existing social norms. There are many factors that are prevalent in our society that cause people to conform. Informational influences, normative influences, and referent influences are three prominent factors that cause people to conform to group norms, however there are limitations as to how much they inform us about why conformity occurs.

Conformity can result due to normative influences and the need to fit in with group norms. Normative influence is based on our nature as social animals. People have the need to be accepted by others and to belong, which can be seen in the study done by Asch in 1951. Asch's experiment was designed to test if participants would conform to a group majority. In his study, the participants were joined with six confederates, who were playing the role of participants to help deceive the participants. The group was shown one standard line and three additional lines, and they were meant to, one by one, say out loud which line matched the standard line in length. The confederates had been told to answer correctly for some of the trials but to answer incorrectly for the majority of them. About 75% of the participants agreed with the confederates' incorrect responses at least once during the trials. Asch discovered that a mean of 32% of the participants agreed with incorrect responses in half or more of the trials. 24% of the participants did not conform to any of the incorrect responses given by the confederates. After a debriefing, the participants all stated that they were aware that they were answering incorrectly many times, but they complied to the group consensus because they did not want to alter the experimenter's results or to be an outsider. This proves that conformity is a result of normative social influence because it proves that humans have a need to belong, and that the desire to belong to a group is stronger than the desire to go against the group and give the correct answer. However Asch's experiment does not entirely prove why people conform to normative influences. 24% of the participants remained independent, proving that many times, our independent thoughts and desires override our desire to belong. This experiment is also not entirely valid, which possibly changed the results. This experiment may not be ecologically valid in regard to the fact that the sampling method was not specified, even though they were all males from one culture. This limits the validity of the study, as culture is an influential factor in conformity. Therefore, the results could not be generalised to everyone. Additionally, it did not lower the Hawthorne effect because participants might have acted in a way that they felt is required by the design of the experiment and conformed, which why participants admitted to conforming in the debriefing. Evidently, there are many factors that can affect conformity on top of normative social influences and the desire to belong. It is critical to observe how many participants remained independent in the experiment, proving that normative influences are not completely reliable reasons for why we conform to group norms.

Informational influences play a prominent role in explaining why people conform to group norms. Informational influences are when we accept the values and behaviors of others as justifiable evidence about how things are in a particular situation. This is demonstrated in Sherif's 1935 experiment aimed to study non-formation and conformity in an ambiguous situation. Participants were tricked into believing that the experiment was investigating visual perception and they were told the experimenter was going to move a light, even though it did not move. In a dark room, they had to determine what how far the light moved, first by themselves, a second time with two other participants, and a third time by themselves again. The findings showed that in the first trial, their estimates fluctuated for some time before converging towards a standard estimate, a personal norm. In the second trial, their estimates soon reflected the influence of estimates from the other two participants in the group, showing a social norm, the average of the individual estimates. In the third phase, participants showed a continued influence to the social norm. This proves that informative